Contraception Outside Marriage

A reader writes:

Please help me understand the Church’s teaching on this issue.  Is it ok for a catholic single person to use contraceptives, if they do not want to end a sexual relationship with their partner, to avoid bringing a child into the situation?  A priest said that God is not in this sexual act, so they cannot be coming between God and the child is not part of God’s will.  (which I know God didn’t will the child to come into the world this way, but he permits the child to be born).

Here is what Pope Paul VI wrote in Humanae Vitae:

We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary.

Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means [Section 14].

There are no qualifiers in this about this situation only pertaining to the case of married couples. What your friend is doing is disrupting the way God designed human sexuality to work.

Specifically, your friend is doing two things:

  1. Separating the procreative aspect of the sexual act from the act itself (i.e., contracepting), and
  2. Separating the sexual act from the marital context in which it is meant to occur (i.e., fornicating).

Your friend’s behavior thus is "coming between [them and] God"–and in two ways. They are compounding the sin of fornication by adding to it the sin of contraception.

Indeed, their use of contraception is facilitating their fornication. You note that the use of contraceptives is because your friend does not want "to end a sexual relationship with their partner, to avoid bringing a child into the situation." The contraception is thus facilitating your friend’s rejection of God’s will by letting her avoid making the choice between (a) ending the sexual relationship or (b) having a baby by a man she isn’t married to. The contraception is thus a sin in itself and it compounds the sin of fornication by lengthening its duration.

What your friend needs to do is to resolve to do what is right: End the sexual relationship and not have sex until marriage and, even then, not to use contraception.

The above-described sins are grave matter, meaning that if they are mortal if done with adequate knowledge and consent.

What the priest said was wrong and was a disservice to your friend.

God will hold him accountable for it.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

15 thoughts on “Contraception Outside Marriage”

  2. Jimmy: Have you thought of allowing for the pop-up comments box on your Blog? I have seen this style used on other Blogs and it’s pretty cool.

  3. Jimmy: Have you thought of allowing for the pop-up comments box on your Blog? I have seen this style used on other Blogs and it’s pretty cool.
    Is that even possible with Typepad hosted blogs? I’ve never seen one that had them (though I’ve seen lots of MT blogs hosted elsewhere that did).
    If it is possible, then I second SLalley’s suggestion.

  4. Arg! Nooooooo.
    Pop up comments make little baby Jesus cry!
    :_(
    Jimmy’s blog has the best comments set up I’ve seen. This way you can link directly to the individual blog entries, or even directly to the comments section.

  5. I hate pop-up comments. I used to tolerate them to read some of those mega-discussions on Mark Shea’s blog, but thank goodness you don’t use them here. It’s so much simpler to just have an ordinary web page. You know where you are with those.

  6. Back to the original post. Contraception is not 100% anyway, so even if you use it, you have to understand that you still may be faced with the possibility of creating life (though not as much as when you use practice purely pro-creative intercourse). This is part of the lie of contraception: our bodies really want to make babies no matter what.
    Also, would there be one million abortions a year if people’s attitudes toward sex were more traditional? Once contraception became acceptable, the definition of intercourse changed. It suddenly became a recreational act. And because people who do recreational activities like baseball and water polo never conceive children in the process, people thought it was only reasonable to not conceive children in the process of recreational sex. This is where abortion comes in. It is the almighty do-over.
    Before contraception, intercourse was a privilege. After contraception, it became a right. Fruitless, but a right nonetheless. This is what happens when you take God out of the act — it becomes focused on the individual.
    Sex with contraception is at best insincere. At worst, it is a horrible sin whereby you ally yourself with the culture of death and their interpretation of sex, and with the increasingly popular doctrine of eugenics.

  7. “Before contraception, intercourse was a privilege.”
    First off, let me say that I hold to the Church’s authentic teaching 100%.
    That having been said, comments like this are really naieve.
    It simply isn’t true that before 1930 people considered sexual intercourse a privilege to be enjoyed only by and between the married. This may have been the official teaching of the Church, but I’m pretty sure this was not the view of the vast majority of the Catholic populace.
    For goodness sake, prostitution was LEGAL in every country in Europe until very recently, and it was so throughout the Middle Ages, and its legalization was actually encouraged by the Church.
    It was extremely common for men of the upper-classes to visit brothels, and even to send their sons to them when they came of age. Perhaps less so in puritannical America, but anyone who is descended from immigrants, and upper-class ones, can tell you otherwise.
    Again, I’m not calling into question the validity of the Church’s teaching, but it’s naive for people to say things like “Before modern times people respected the sancity of marriage.” This simply was not the case, for most people. Marriags were arranged, most couples lived miserably, and the only reason they didn’t divorce was because it was not considered respectable to do so. The men had their mistresses and whores, and the wives accepted it as a fact-of-life.
    You could say the same about the life-mentality of previous centuries. People were not more pro-life than they are today. Deformed, mentally retarded, or otherwise unwatned children were frequently killed by parents, usually with the help of a nursemaid, and the death atributed to natural causes or “accident.” Premarital pregnancies were aborted, or else kept secret, until the woman could deliver and the infant could be secretly trashed.
    Or, if the parents were gracious, they might leave the child in a basket in front of a church.
    And this is only in recent times. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was accepted, even expected, that those in the upperclasses (high-churchmen included) would have bastard children and msitresses and/or concubines. It usually was not considered scandalous. This may not have been common among the peasants, but this was because bastard kids were extra mouths to feed. (Hence the relatively common infanticide.)
    The point of this post? We really shouldn’t despair when we look at the world around us. Things have always been as bad, if not worse, as they are now, and so they will be until Christ comes again in glory. It does no one a service to pretend that we once lived in a golden age of respect for marriage, sexuality, and life.
    Such an age never existed, and in my humble opinion, never will.

  8. There is a difference between engaging in acts and approving of acts.
    Sure, people did abort illegitimate children; that’s exactly what Fair Janet was trying to do in the ballad when Tam Lin caught her. But he didn’t exactly approve:
    ” And all to kill the bonnie babe
    That we got us between ”

  10. Name search

    Search or Browse Girl and Boy Baby Names Meanings and Origins at Babies Online –
    Free services and information for new & expectant parents…

  12. Internet Directory Assistance; Yellow Pages, White Pages …

    Phone numbers and addresses for persons and businesses in the United States. Includes links to directories for other countries.

  14. Search the Internet and Find Websites-The Library

    Using and Searching the Web. BASIC INTERNET. A Basic Guide to the Internet: A brief discussion of the Internet and its components; Understanding the World …

Comments are closed.